Obituary — Rev. Osmond Fisher. 383 



are, bv a crust of these silicates.' In this case tliere is no doubt 

 that fluorides contained in the tuff magma were the catalyzers or 

 mineralizers. 



When we have solved all these problems, then will be the time to 

 institute a true classification of rocks and their mineral constituents, 

 but until then any of the recent attempts to do so only hide our 

 ignorance under a cloud of fantastic but unfounded generalizations. 

 The 'saturation of minerals' is, I contend, more accurately represented 

 by my ' principle of fraction exhaustion '. 



H. J. Johnston-Lavis. 



VlTTFX (VOSGES), FRANCE. 

 July 16, 1914. 



OBIT"Cr.A.Ii"^. 



Rev. OSMOND FISHER, M.A., F.G.S., 



Hon". Fellow and late Tutor of Jesus College, Cambridge. 

 Born November 17, 1817. Died July 12, 1914. 



So lately as last June we claimed our dear and valued friend, the 

 Rev. Osmond Fisher, as one of the four surviving contributors to 

 the opening volume of the Geological Magazine in 1864, and now in 

 August we have to record his loss. He passed peacefully away on 

 Sunday, July 12, after an honourable and useful life of 97 years, 

 retaining his faculties active until the end. 



Those who knew him need no record of his worth ; for the younger 

 generation of geologists, we may refer them to his life and portrait 

 which appeared in the Geological Magazine for February, 1900, 

 pp. 49-54. 



From a very early age Osmond Fisher displayed a keen interest in 

 geology, and was an assiduous collector of fossils in Dorset and Wilts. 

 When at King's College he attended lectures by Lyell and Daniell 

 and visited the galleries of the British Museum. He entered Jesus 

 College, Cambridge, in 1836, taking up mathematics, in which he 

 graduated as 18th Wrangler in 1841. Whilst at Cambridge Fisher 

 attended Sedgwick's lectures and soon a warm friendship followed, 

 and later on, in 1852, Sedgwick proposed Fisher as a Fellow of the 

 Geological Society. 



Besides the numerous papers which Osmond Fisher communicated 

 to the Geological Society, the Philosophical and the Geological 

 Magazines, the British Association, and elsewhere, he published a most 

 important work, I'he Physics of the Earth's Crust, to which subject he 

 devoted fully thirty years of his life, and expended the best efforts 

 of his mathematical powers to perfect. 



The Geological Society, always anxious to welcome the contri- 

 butions of mathematical geologists, awarded him the ' Lyell Fund ' 

 in 1887, and the Murchison Medal in 1893 ; but the crowning 

 recognition of his life's work, the award of the Wollaston Gold Medal, 

 did not take place until 1913, probably owing to the retirement in 



' "On the Formation at Low Temperatures of certain Fluorides, Silicates, 

 Oxides, etc., in the Pipernoid Tuff of the Campania " : Geol. Mag., Dec. IV, 

 Vol. II, pp. 309-13, 1895. 



